A Walk in the Woods

Bryson moves back to New Hampshire after twenty years in England, notices the Appalachian Trail passing near his house, and decides to walk all 2,200 miles of it. He is unfit and unprepared. The only person willing to come is an old friend named Katz, who is worse on both counts and who begins jettisoning equipment — including food — within days.

The comic material is Katz and the weather and the two of them being comprehensively out of their depth. Threaded through it is a genuinely good popular history of the trail and of American forests: what the chestnut blight took, how the Park Service has behaved, why the woods are quieter than they used to be. Bryson is angry about a lot of it, and the anger sits oddly and effectively beside the jokes.

They do not finish, and the book says so plainly, which is part of why it has lasted. It is a walking book for people who are not going to walk it, and it is very funny about the specific misery of a third consecutive day of rain.